Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:A Tale of Two Cities
.pdf
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
streets, I should be more unhappy and self-reproachful now
than I can tell you. Even as it is – ”
Even as it was, she could not command her voice.
In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid
her face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad,
as the light of the sun itself is – as the light called human life
is – at its coming and its going.
“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel
quite, quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties
of mine, will ever interpose between us? I know it well, but do
you know it? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain?”
Her father answered, with a cheerful fi rmness of conviction he could scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling!
More than that,” he added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it
could have been – nay, than it ever was – without it.”
“If I could hope that, my father! – ”
“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and
how plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and
young, cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your
life should not be wasted – ”
She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his,
and repeated the word.
“ – wasted, my child – should not be wasted, struck aside
from the natural order of things – for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has
gone on this; but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness
be perfect, while yours was incomplete?”
“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been
quite happy with you.”
241
CHARLES DICKENS
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would
have been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not
been Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no
other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark part of
my life would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would
have fallen on you.”
It was the fi rst time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing
him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange
and new sensation while his words were in her ears; and she
remembered it long afterwards.
“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards
the moon. “I have looked at her from my prison-window, when
I could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has
been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I
had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I
have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have
thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could
draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular
lines with which I could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was
twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was diffi cult
to squeeze in.”
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to
that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing
to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed
to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire
endurance that was over.
“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon
the unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was
242
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
alive. Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s
shock had killed it. Whether it was a son who would some
day avenge his father. (There was a time in my imprisonment,
when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it
was a son who would never know his father’s story; who might
even live to weigh the possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will and act. Whether it was a daughter who
would grow to be a woman.”
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.
“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me – rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious
of me. I have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have
seen her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I
have altogether perished from the remembrance of the living,
and in the next generation my place was a blank.”
“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a
daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been
that child.”
“You, Lucie? It is out of the Consolation and restoration
you have brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and
pass between us and the moon on this last night. – What did
I say just now?”
“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”
“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and
the silence have touched me in a different way – have affected
me with something as like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any
emotion that had pain for its foundations could – I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and leading me out into
the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her image in the
moonlight often, as I now see you; except that I never held
her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and
243
CHARLES DICKENS
the door. But, you understand that that was not the child I am
speaking of?”
“The fi gure was not; the – the – image; the fancy?”
“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed
sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind
pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother.
The other had that likeness too – as you have – but was not
the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt
you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these
perplexed distinctions.”
His collected and calm manner could not prevent her
blood from running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old
condition.
“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the
moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to show me that
the home of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture was in her room, and I
was in her prayers. Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but my
poor history pervaded it all.”
“I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but in
my love that was I.”
“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of
Beauvais, “and they had heard of me, and had been taught to
pity me. When they passed a prison of the State, they kept far
from its frowning walls, and looked up at its bars, and spoke
in whispers. She could never deliver me; I imagined that she
always brought me back after showing me such things. But
then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and
blessed her.”
244
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
“I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will
you bless me as fervently to-morrow?”
“Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have
to-night for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were
wildest, never rose near the happiness that I have known with
you, and that we have before us.”
He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven,
and humbly thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him.
By-and-bye, they went into the house.
There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry;
there was even to be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross.
The marriage was to make no change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it, by taking to themselves
the upper rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more.
Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They
were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He
regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and
drank to him affectionately.
So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they
separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came downstairs again, and stole into his room; not
free from unshaped fears, beforehand.
All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and
he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled
pillow, and his hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her
needless candle in the shadow at a distance, crept up to his
bed, and put her lips to his; then, leaned over him, and looked
at him.
245
CHARLES DICKENS
Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had
worn; but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so
strong, that he held the mastery of them even in his sleep. A
more remarkable face in its quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be beheld in all the
wide dominions of sleep, that night.
She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up
a prayer that she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew
her hand, and kissed his lips once more, and went away. So, the
sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves of the plane-tree
moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved in praying
for him.
246
XVIII. NINE DAYS
The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were
ready outside the closed door of the Doctor’s room, where he
was speaking with Charles Darnay. They were ready to go to
church; the beautiful bride, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross – to
whom the event, through a gradual process of reconcilement
to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss, but
for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon
should have been the bridegroom.
“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not suffi ciently admire the bride, and who had been moving round her to take
in every point of her quiet, pretty dress; “and so it was for this,
my sweet Lucie, that I brought you across the Channel, such
a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought what I was doing!
How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring on my
friend Mr. Charles!”
“You didn’t mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss
Pross, “and therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”
“Really? Well; but don’t cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry.
“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; “you are.”
“I, my Pross?” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant
with her, on occasion.)
“You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at
it. Such a present of plate as you have made ‘em, is enough to
247
CHARLES DICKENS
bring tears into anybody’s eyes. There’s not a fork or a spoon
in the collection,” said Miss Pross, “that I didn’t cry over, last
night after the box came, till I couldn’t see it.”
“I am highly gratifi ed,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my
honour, I had no intention of rendering those trifl ing articles
of remembrance invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear,
dear! To think that there might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any
time these fi fty years almost!”
“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.
“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?”
asked the gentleman of that name.
“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your
cradle.”
“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little
wig, “that seems probable, too.”
“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross,
“before you were put in your cradle.”
“Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was very unhandsomely dealt with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the
selection of my pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm soothingly round her waist, “I hear them moving
in the next room, and Miss Pross and I, as two formal folks of
business, are anxious not to lose the fi nal opportunity of saying
something to you that you wish to hear. You leave your good
father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your own;
he shall be taken every conceivable care of; during the next
fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts,
even Tellson’s shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking)
before him. And when, at the fortnight’s end, he comes to join
you and your beloved husband, on your other fortnight’s trip
248
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him to you in the
best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear Somebody’s
step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an oldfashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to claim
his own.”
For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at
the well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then
laid the bright golden hair against his little brown wig, with a
genuine tenderness and delicacy which, if such things be oldfashioned, were as old as Adam.
The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out
with Charles Darnay. He was so deadly pale – which had not
been the case when they went in together – that no vestige of
colour was to be seen in his face. But, in the composure of his
manner he was unaltered, except that to the shrewd glance of
Mr. Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication that the old air
of avoidance and dread had lately passed over him, like a cold
wind.
He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs
to the chariot which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day.
The rest followed in another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange eyes looked on, Charles
Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.
Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of
the little group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright
and sparkling, glanced on the bride’s hand, which were newly
released from the dark obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry’s pockets.
They returned home to breakfast, and all went well, and in
due course the golden hair that had mingled with the poor
shoemaker’s white locks in the Paris garret, were mingled with
249
CHARLES DICKENS
them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the
door at parting.
It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her
father cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself
from her enfolding arms, “Take her, Charles! She is yours!”
And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was gone.
The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious,
and the preparations having been very simple and few, the
Doctor, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was
when they turned into the welcome shade of the cool old hall,
that Mr. Lorry observed a great change to have come over the
Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted there, had struck him a
poisoned blow.
He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion
might have been expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was the old scared lost look that
troubled Mr. Lorry; and through his absent manner of clasping his head and drearily wandering away into his own room
when they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry was reminded of Defarge
the wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride.
“I think,” he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, “I think we had best not speak to him just now, or at
all disturb him. I must look in at Tellson’s; so I will go there at
once and come back presently. Then, we will take him a ride
into the country, and dine there, and all will be well.”
It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson’s, than to
look out of Tellson’s. He was detained two hours. When he
came back, he ascended the old staircase alone, having asked
no question of the servant; going thus into the Doctor’s rooms,
he was stopped by a low sound of knocking.
250
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]